Guest column: Florida must expand voting rights

As we marked Independence Day and the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we need to examine what is yet to be accomplished to end racial discrimination.

In Florida, we are still faced with racial disparities in voting, education, employment and the criminal and juvenile justice systems.

We need to confront Florida’s continuing history of perpetuating a Jim Crow policy of permanently disenfranchising individuals who have a past felony conviction.

Approximately 1.5 million Florida citizens have been disfranchised by this policy. One in four of the state’s voting age black population are shut out of our democracy by the policy. It was created in the post-Civil War era precisely to dilute the voting power of African Americans.

As recently as 2011, an African-American voter mobilization effort, Souls to the Polls, was shut down when the Legislature banned Sunday voting just before Election Day.

PRISON AS VOTING SUPPRESSION

We must also look at how our criminal justice system disproportionately impacts racial and ethnic minorities. Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With over 2.3 million men and women living behind bars, our imprisonment rate is the highest it’s ever been in history.

As Michelle Alexander has noted, Jim Crow laws may have been wiped off the books decades ago, but still an astounding percentage of African-Americans are warehoused in prisons or trapped in a permanent second-class status.

Our drug laws, more precisely how drug laws are enforced in minority communities, has led to this outcome.

The school-to-prison-pipeline, a series of policies and programs that criminalize juvenile behavior and push students out of classrooms and into the criminal justice system, disproportionately feeds on students of color.

MORE SUBTLE DISCRIMINATION

And as Florida’s immigrant population grows and Congress continues to refuse to fix our broken immigration system, Hispanic Floridians are stopped, questioned and detained by police who are implicitly encouraged to use racial profiling to enforce immigration laws.

To be sure, the Florida of 2014 is not the Florida of 1964.

Explicitly racist laws and policies are no longer allowed, thanks in no small part to the Civil Rights Act.

But subtler, more sophisticated and pernicious forms of racial inequity still exist 50 years after the law’s passage.

We must make it the work of today to stamp those out.

From the moment we declared independence through the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s and even today, our nation has always been a work in progress.

In honoring the history that brought us to where we are and how far we’ve come in bending the long arc of the moral universe, we must also prepare ourselves for how much further we have to go.

Joyce Hamilton Henry of Tampa is director of advocacy for the ACLU of Florida.